The Guitar Industry's Quiet Marketing Problem
I've been a guitar player for thirty-five years and a marketer for twenty-five. These two halves of my brain don't usually intersect. Lately they've been doing nothing but.
There's a glut of incredible gear in this industry right now. Where there used to be a handful of true artisan-level builders, today there are hundreds. Pickup makers, amp builders, boutique pedal designers, custom guitar shops, restoration specialists. The market is the most exciting it's been in decades. And one thing I keep hearing is that even brands with serious craft and great products are having a harder time than they should breaking through.
The standard approach looks similar across the categories: chase whatever trend is moving on social media, try to sponsor the next breakout artist, pump out one press release after another. None of that is wrong on its face. A good press release matters. Social done well matters. Artist sponsorships and events can be powerful when they're connected to systems that turn the attention they generate into customers.
But run without that follow-up layer, even the best of those moves end up as short-lived spikes. A press release with no system to capture and follow up with the readers it attracts. A trend chase with no plan to turn attention into a list, a lead, or a sale. An artist activation that peaks at the post and disappears.
I've been turning over a thought for a while: there's a strategy for breaking out of a crowded creative industry that's been refined over decades in another one I know well. And it would map onto the guitar world almost too cleanly.
A quick note on where I'm coming from
I spent twenty-five years on the marketing side of publishing — most notably more than tripling annual sales of the Curious George franchise at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and taking children's author Sandra Boynton's Dog Train to RIAA Gold (yes, a book that won a Gold Record — which still sounds slightly ridiculous when I say it out loud). It's an industry that runs on almost identical mechanics to guitar, and they've been solving the same problems since the invention of the printing press.
My first serious job in publishing was at Workman, working under Peter Workman, a publishing legend who reviewed every single piece of marketing creative in person, fully mocked-up, before it went out the door. I saw firsthand the tactics he used to make Workman books global bestsellers and his competitors jealous over and over again. Two years of being measured against that bar taught me more than the rest of my career combined.
I've also been obsessed with guitar since I was twelve. Played in (and started) a few bands in NYC and San Francisco — originals and covers — and have been selling high-end gear through my Reverb shop for nearly a decade. Gigged for a few years and I'm in-between projects right now. I've been lucky enough to take lessons from Andy Wood, Teemu Mäntysaari, and Marshall Harrison, and I've made some great friends through forums and Facebook groups in the community.
I should be up front: I'm just getting started working with brands in the guitar world. But the parallels between what I watched work in publishing for two decades and what I see (or don't see) happening in this industry have been hard to stop thinking about.
Bookstores and guitar shops are running the same business
The two retail channels look completely different on the surface. They're not. Both sell into curated, limited physical space. Both depend on staff trust and recommendation. Both serve research-heavy customers — the book buyer who reads three reviews and a podcast interview before committing is the same profile as the player who watches six YouTube demos, reads the Premier Guitar review, and scrolls TGP for two hours before they'll spend eighteen hundred dollars. And both face the same fundamental challenge: too many releases competing for not enough space and attention.
There's also a parallel that's worth naming. In publishing, even as commerce has shifted heavily to chains and Amazon, indie bookstores remain disproportionately important as taste-making channels — the places where reputations actually form. Guitar retail seems to run the same way. The chains and online retailers handle the bulk of transactions, but the shops where staff plays everything they sell are where opinions get shaped and word spreads. Brands that understand this tend to invest accordingly. From the outside, it doesn't look like most do.
So if both industries face the same realities, why does one of them have a deep, refined approach to launches, and the other one doesn't seem to have settled on one yet?
A small thing that's worth a lot
A lot of guitar brand and shop sites haven't installed the most basic piece of modern marketing infrastructure — a Meta pixel, a Google tag, a way to follow up with the players who landed on the site, looked at three guitars, and left. Not a criticism so much as a reflection of how new this layer of marketing is to the people running these businesses, most of whom got into it because they love the instrument.
But the math is striking. Most players who arrive at a brand site don't buy on the first visit — that's normal, the e-commerce conversion rate baseline sits around two to three percent. Which means roughly ninety-seven percent of the spend driving traffic to a brand's site is leaving without a trace, and many brands have no way to get those players back. A retargeting pixel takes about fifteen minutes to install and costs nothing to run. The fact that it's missing in so many places suggests there's significant room to grow on this side of the business.
That floor — modern tracking, follow-up sequences, and the systems that connect them to dealer and retail activity — is what everything else here sits on top of.
Half of the marketing job lives behind the counter
Back at Workman, I had a team unwrap a hundred Hershey bars one by one and rewrap them in custom paper labeled “Workman Backlist Bar.” Slipped under each wrapper was a scratch-off card showing the bookseller which discount tier they'd unlocked. Every ticket was a winner. And hidden in five of those bars were “golden tickets,” Willy Wonka-style — the bookseller who found one got Workman's deepest backlist terms forever. Then we shipped the box to bookstores.
The customer never saw the candy bar. The customer wasn't the audience. The booksellers behind the counter were — the people who decide what gets featured, who hand-sells which titles, who shapes what a customer actually encounters in the store. That kind of work is called trade marketing, or dealer marketing, and in publishing it's roughly half the job. By the time a customer is standing in a bookstore looking at the new-release table, the marketing that determined what's on that table already happened weeks before, between the publisher and the bookstore.
From the outside, it doesn't look like there's much of this kind of activity flowing toward guitar dealers from the brand side right now. Not because anyone is doing anything wrong — most guitar shops are run by players and luthiers and lifers who love the instrument, not merchandising programs. But the dealer-marketing infrastructure that publishers take for granted — POS materials for new releases, staff briefings, in-store contests, dealer-incentive programs — looks like something that hasn't fully been built here yet, not something that's been built and abandoned. That reads as opportunity, not failure.
The best marketing investment I ever saw was a tabletop grill that lost money
Years ago at Workman, we shipped a campaign to bookstores that lost money on the initial sale. Peter knew it would lose money before we sent the first kit. He greenlit it anyway, and when the margins came back negative, he didn't blink.
The grills were designed to draw attention to an in-store summer promotion for a series of grilling books by the BBQ personality and author Steven Raichlen. We shipped a kit with a pre-assorted twenty-four-copy set of Raichlen's BBQ titles, custom branded signage with a URL, a die-cut promotional brochure listing his backlist, and — the centerpiece — a working mini tabletop grill, with the books displayed inside it.
The unit margin was negative. Peter didn't care. The grill was permanent and would enjoy free real estate inside stores, rented through a one-time, money-losing investment. It would sit on a counter or an endcap for years, and every time a customer walked past it, they encountered Raichlen's books and the URL on the signage. Reorders would happen against that fixture for as long as it lived in the store.
I built my own version of it years later — a national permanent-display program for Brain Quest with lifetime discount terms that drove a 15-to-30-percent sell-through lift across participating stores and stayed on shelves for years.
This idea translates to merchandising guitar products inside stores cleanly. A few brands have started funding permanent fixtures at top dealers — beautiful display cases, custom cradles, real cabinet work instead of corrugated cardboard. That's a smart move on its own. A natural next layer would be wiring digital marketing into those fixtures. Every guitar in the display gets its own QR code pointing to a model-specific landing page — spec sheet, demo videos, sound samples, finish options, dealer-specific bundles, lead capture, automated follow-up. Now the brand knows: this player was at this dealer on this day, scanned the specific Tele variant, watched the demo, didn't convert in-store. Three days later, that player gets a follow-up with deeper content on that exact model. Behavior-based retargeting keeps it in front of them across Meta and YouTube until they buy or until enough time passes that the brand stops spending on them.
Same fixture cost. Multiplicatively more output. The permanent fixture wouldn't be the marketing program. It'd be the infrastructure the marketing program runs on top of for years.
A question it raises
What would change if endorsements were treated more like “proof of real use” and less like a badge brands hand out?
One campaign, five audiences
A few years into my time at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, I worked on a Curious George partnership with First Book — the nonprofit that gets new books into the hands of kids in under-resourced communities. The mechanic was simple: a passport-style activation where every stamp earned by a player triggered a book donation, with a fifty-thousand-book minimum guarantee.
That single campaign activated five audiences at once. Consumers had a reason to participate. Retailers had a real reason to dedicate floor space, because foot traffic and brand-positive press came with it. Educators had curriculum-aligned events to plug into. Media had a substantive philanthropic story to cover beyond product. And First Book got fundraising lift along with brand alignment to one of the biggest kids' franchises in the world. Five audiences. One mechanic. Compounding returns across each one.
That's the architecture move most marketing campaigns leave on the table. A Meta ad targets consumers. A dealer email targets retailers. A press release targets media. Each touchpoint operates independently, and the brand spends three or four times the energy to engage three or four audiences than it would have if a single well-designed campaign had done all the jobs at once.
Imagine a pickup brand running an original-song contest with a $25,000 grand prize, open to any guitarist using the brand's pickups in the recording. Submissions go through dealer-tagged links — every dealer gets a unique URL, and a portion of the prize pool flows back as bonuses to the dealers whose customers submit the most entries. A portion of proceeds funds music education in under-resourced school districts. Now consumers have a reason to buy the pickups, dealers have skin in the game, media has a philanthropic story, top YouTube creators have a content engine to platform, and the brand walks away with a list of engaged players, dealer-attribution data, real press, and a pile of original songs featuring their pickups that becomes social fuel for months.
None of this works without a real reason for someone to care. Andy Wood put it bluntly in a recent conversation I had with him: “Never forget that the artist endorses the gear, not the other way around. Just because a company gives you a discount or free gear—or even puts you on their website—that doesn't mean that the general listener will be invested in you and your music. Inversely, if you put out killer stuff that connects with the target audience or general public, then everyone will care about the tools you used to make the art.” That's a working artist saying out loud something I've watched play out in publishing for years: an endorsement isn't a substitute for demand. It's confirmation of demand that already exists.
The contest gives players a reason. The dealer kickback gives stores a reason. The cause partner gives media a reason. The brand isn't asking anyone to care about the brand for its own sake. It's giving every audience a reason that matters to them, and letting the brand benefit as a side effect.
What I keep coming back to
The pattern that connects every story here is one idea: in publishing, the brands that won in the most crowded years were the ones that built infrastructure, not the ones that spiked attention. Permanent retail fixtures, recurring communication channels, multi-audience activation, tracking and follow-up, dealer-marketing programs that compounded over time. Everything was designed to keep working long after launch week ended.
A lot of marketing in the guitar world looks more like the opposite from where I'm sitting — campaigns that spike and then go quiet, promo items that get tossed, displays that get recycled, brand-dealer relationships that, at least from the outside, look mostly transactional. Some of that is the inheritance of an industry built by people who care about the craft first. Some of it is just that nobody's been running this play here yet.
Maybe there's a reason this approach doesn't translate cleanly that I haven't figured out yet. Maybe the economics of guitar products are different enough from book publishing that some of these tactics fall flat. I don't know yet.
What I do know is what twenty-five years in publishing taught me to look for when an industry is too crowded for any single product to stand out: what works, what doesn't, and what almost always works once somebody is brave enough to try it first.
None of this is theoretical. It's been running in another industry for decades. Whether it shows up here, and which brands move first if it does, is the part I find genuinely interesting to watch.
Pete Bohan spent 25 years running national launch and retail programs in the book publishing industry for brands like Curious George, Brain Quest, and Sandra Boynton — including a few campaigns that involved unwrapping a lot of candy bars and sourcing hundreds of working tabletop grills. Occasional cover band lead guitarist. Other rantings at bohanmarketing.com/guitar-industry-voices.
